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If you are trying to make a salad, but don't know how to pair the ingredients, take a look at this Infographic, will show you the best ingredients to mix and some tasteful dressings to enjoy!The source is Lifehacker.

Polish painter Justyna Kopania depicts melancholy seascapes and towering ships obscured by mist with liberal applications of oil paint. Crashing waves are depicted with splashes of paint, and sails are formed with the stroke of a palette knife. You can see more over on Saatchi Art and Facebook. (via MEERESSTILLE)

Fascinated by the mysteries of the ocean his entire life, photographer Pierre Carreau (previously) documents the power and serenity of ocean waves in his now decade-long project AquaViva. After obtaining a business degree and going into IT, Carreau dramatically changed course in 2004 and moved with his family to the Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy where he now photographs waves as an artistic pursuit.

Carreau’s high-speed photos capture waves that appear frozen in time, giving them an almost sculptural appearance. “Water is amazing,” Carreau says. “Basically it has no color, but through reflection and refraction it can possess all of them, the entire spectrum of light.” More from his statement about AquaViva:

Carreau observes that the photographic images of AquaViva may sometimes be perceived as objects rather than as two-dimensional representations. The play of light off the multitude of facets and curves on the water’s surface gives the image a sculptural quality that enhances the sense of stillness and power. This simultaneous depiction of roiling movement and suspended kinetic energy parallels the dual nature of the oceans and of water itself: life-giving and yet dangerous, inviting and yet fearsome, primordial and yet ever-changing and always renewed.

Seen here is a collection of new photos from 2014 mixed with a few earlier shots we had yet to feature on Colossal, and there’s plenty more to see.

A bronze bull head fountain is suddenly transformed into a minotaur. A decrepit corner of an alley becomes a holding pen for ostriches. If any of these odd happenings sound familiar to you, you’re probably living in Paris and have just witnessed the work of French artist Charles Leval (previously). Going by the name Levalet, the artist injects humor into the streets of Paris by gluing animal and human-shaped pasteups onto walls. A lot of thought goes into location too as each piece usually interacts with its environment in one way or another.

Levalet has been updating his site and facebook page with new work he’s created so far in 2015. When not on the streets, Levalet can be found in a classroom (he teaches art) and in a gallery (he held an exhibition late last year at Galerie Geraldine Zberro). “I was looking for places and contexts to operate,” says Levalet, referring to his prime medium: the wall. “The street became a creative space I had to invade.” (via StreetArtNews)

(S)Edition is an installation of 99 books made to look like common Amanita Muscaria mushrooms by Chicago artist Melissa Jay Craig. The installation has been shown in a various configurations the last few years, and only once in its entirety at the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio back in 2010. From her statement about the installation:

Fungus is an agent of change. I’m fascinated with its myriad forms, and I love to go in search of it. I can become more excited by discovering a beautiful fungal growth than by perusing artwork ‘discovered’ for us by curators in contemporary museums. When I was a child, the first time I had the intriguing feeling that the planet carried messages (texts, if you will) for those who were curious enough to look, was when I came upon a group of Amanita Muscaria, huddled together in a dark, secret space under tall pines.

Japanese design office Nendo has created 9 different types of chocolate. While each are the same size, not a single piece from the Chocolatexture collection look alike. That’s because Oki Sato, who leads the Tokyo and Milan-based firm, rethought the concept of chocolate by focusing on texture. “There are many factors that determine a chocolate’s taste,” says Sato, referring to factors like the origin of cocoa, the percentage used, and the various different flavors. But by instead turning his attention to attributes like pointy, smooth and rough, the designer has created distinctive chocolates that all use identical ingredients but taste completely different due to the various textures.

Each of the 9 chocolates were inspired by an onomatopoeic word from the Japanese language that describes texture. The chocolates correspond with words like “toge toge” (sharp pointy tips), “sube sube” (smooth edges and corners) and “zara zara” (granular, like a file). Chocolatexture was created for the Maison & Objet trade fair currently taking place this week in Paris. 400 limited edition Chocolatexture sets were created and will be sold during the event in Paris at what’s being dubbed the “Chocolatexture lounge.” (syndicated from Spoon & Tamago)

My skin, with the cold of the winter and the last week's stress is dull and grey. I think I will follow some of these healthy advices from Health Central and I will tell you if my skin has improved or if it has the same bad shape...

There’s an innate relationship between children and the animal kingdom. Our children sing songs about animals, the have toy animals, they have books about animals and they dream about animals. Capturing this unique connection is Indonesian artist Elicia Edijanto, who depicts small, vulnerable children alongside creatures of the wild like elephants, wolves and bears. Created in stark black and white imagery, and using only watercolors, Edijanto creates dreamlike-scenes that are both tranquil and contemplative. You can see more of her work on Behance and you can follow her on Instagram. (via Fubiz)

Evil doers don't need excuses to commit hedious acts, so please STOP BEING AFRAID and justifying their violence by saying things like ‪#‎CharlieHebdo‬ provoked it.People who are robbed / assaulted, and worse, daily on the streets and everywhere in the world; people who were in the ‪#‎twintowers‬; the kids in Norway; just as today's hostages in the grocery store in Paris; and all the millions who fall to gratuitous terror, they all didn't do anything do deserve any of the violence beset upon them.

Set yourself free, be unafraid, do not subdue yourselves to maniacs for that is the same as allowing them to go through with their evil doing.

ALWAYS STAND UP FOR #PEACE AND #LOVE

This is all human stupidity circle at its best, a big growing snowball of fear, prejudice, hatred and evil. Now all the right-extremist are surfacing taking the oportunity to attack mosques and so. Between the irrationalities of extreme nationalism and of terrorism of religious fanatics I can't tell which one is more idiotic. If we have developed as supposedly rational beings that are able to analyse and think their actions upfront, we should be more civilized and realize that we're not meant to kill each other but on the contrary, united we could find intelligent ways to achieve solutions for global wellbeing. But unfortunately it seems people's brains and whole knowledge and efforts don't run at the same velocity for everyone and those are the main reasons that, having different visions of the world and consequently goals, makes the world go back and forth in cycles of violence and retrocess since the beginnings.

We're supposed to be better or fighting (with intellectual means - that so many do achieve great solutions and all -, since that's what supposedly distinguishes us in this World) to get better than all this crappy things we do. Just now I saw this cartoon (http://www.theguardian.com/.../joe-sacco-on-satire-a...) and I remembered the saying "An eye for an eye will make the whole world BLIND"; can't people see this and think and yes philosophy to achieve an actual good teory to put in practical ways after, and surpass the fear, panic, and short term preemptive war mind? Yes, it is hard to do so, to stand up in front of the trees in the Amazon facing the deforesters for example, but someone's got to do it, to be corageous (heroes) just like simple cartoonists (who were prized all over the world for decades) who only made some drawings defending freedom and art while denouncing the ridiculous evil crimes all over the world. Otherwise, it's not a world worth living in, where everyone gets to kill everyone just because their not accordingly to their rules. We are thousands of millions and we should not bow to a handful of despots who only see their own bellies.

One of my favorite Flickr accounts to follow is Singapore-based photographer Nicky Bay (previously) who ventures into some of the most ecologically diverse (ie. creepiest and crawliest) places in the world to shoot macro photos of insects, arachnids, and fungi. Bay went on 46 different shooting excursions in 2014 and discovered creatures that seem more at home in an Avatar movie than here on Earth. He’s also begun working more with ultraviolet light that he uses to reveal the natural fluorescence of many organisms he encounters. My favorite discovery while scrolling through Bay’s 2014 photos is this species of moth that builds a cage out of its own caterpillar spines to protect itself while in a pupal stage. You can follow his day-to-day adventures on Facebook.

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People cleverly organizes the daily schedules of famous artists, philosophers, writers, and composers as recorded in their own diaries and letters. Not only does it show how they switched gears between creating, sleeping, and leisure time, but the chart is fully interactive including quotes from each individual. I would love to see a version of this with modern creatives (and more women) as well. (via Coudal)

Artist Jeremy Miranda is fascinated with how the mind creates memories and the juxtaposition of experiences both real and perceived. His oil paintings overlap interior and exterior environments to create unexpected relationships between disparate subjects, usually natural versus man-made. The interior of an artist’s studio dissolves into a bucolic river landscape, a bookshelf leads into the ocean, or a glowing furnace is concealed below quiet pond. Miranda most recently had an exhibit at Nahcotta Gallery in New Hampshire where several of his original works are currently available. Some of his most popular images are also available as prints. (via My Darkened Eyes)

If you asked me when the history of bootleg music began, I would have assumed it arrived with the invention of the cassette tape, something small, inexpensive and portable that was easily duplicated in any garage from deck A to deck B. In reality, widespread bootlegging dates back even further, to the 1950s in the Soviet Union where music lovers, desperate for banned Western tunes, devised an ingenious way to print their own records. The only problem was the scarcity of vinyl.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. With the aid of a special device, people started pressing banned jazz and rock n’ roll music on thick radiographs scavenged from the dumpsters of hospitals. X-rays were plentiful (not to mention cheap), and while the records could only be pressed on a single side, the music they produced using a standard turntable was passable. The recordings even had a catchy name: bone music. From an interview with author Anya von Bremzen via NPR:

“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan—forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

By 1958 the authorities caught on and the act of making x-ray records was made illegal. It wasn’t long before the largest distribution networks of illicit bone music were discovered and shut down. You can see more scans of bone music over on this page created by Jozsef Hajdu, and FastCo has a great article about the entire phenomenon. (via Junk Culture, NPR, FastCo)

Criss-crossing the world with stops on almost every continent, San Francisco-based photographer Beth Moon spent the last 14 years seeking out some of the largest, rarest, and oldest trees on Earth to capture with her camera. Moon develops her exhibition prints with a platinum/palladium process, an extremely labor-intensive and rare practice resulting in prints with tremendous tonal range that are durable enough to rival the longitivity of her subjects, potentially lasting thousands of years. Moon’s collected work of 60 duotone prints were recently published in a new book titled Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time. From Abbeville Press:

This handsome volume presents sixty of Moon’s finest tree portraits as full-page duotone plates. The pictured trees include the tangled, hollow-trunked yews—some more than a thousand years old—that grow in English churchyards; the baobabs of Madagascar, called “upside-down trees” because of the curious disproportion of their giant trunks and modest branches; and the fantastical dragon’s-blood trees, red-sapped and umbrella-shaped, that grow only on the island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa.

A radical group of wolf haters is gearing up for a “wolf-killing derby” in Idaho. This year, a group of hunters will gather together to slaughter as many wolves and coyotes as they can, with prizes for the largest wolf slain and the most coyotes bagged. Those involved claim the hunt will keep predator populations in check, but Vice went undercover to speak to some of the hunters and found that population control is only part of the motivation. For some, inflicting pain and suffering is the name of the game. If you want to see an end to the cruel wolf-killing derby, sign the petition here!

One of the most gratifying aspects of watching stop-motion films is the knowledge that every bit of motion seen on screen is created by human hands, frame by frame, millimeter by millimeter. While an animator might tell you it takes an entire day just to film a 3-second sequence, it’s still difficult to imagine how much physical labor is involved to accomplish it. Lucky for us, the animators behind Laika’s Boxtrolls snuck in a short post-credits timelapse that reveals a brief glimpse of what happens behind the scenes to make two characters come to life.

I first saw Boxtrolls in the theater last September with my son, and this single scene caused a more vocal response from the audience than any other moment in the entire movie. People were literally gasping, myself included. Over the holidays, Focus Features finally made it available online through their YouTube channel.

New York-based artist Maude White (previously) continues to create beautifully rendered illustrations with cut paper, creating dozens of new pieces since we explored her work this summer. White relies heavily on thin lines and negative space to create each illustration, a subtractive process with no room for error; a single bad cut could be fatal to a piece. Her latest series titled What’s Left on the Farm involves portraits of women with objects in their hair.

White currently has work in an exhibition at Peter & Mary Ann Vogt Gallery in Buffalo, and you can read a recent interview with her over on Artvoice. (via Hi-Fructose)

After a long period of pummeling wind, snow, and ice, weather photographer Marko Korosec sensed an opportunity to climb Mount Javornik, part of a mountain range in eastern Slovenia and the location of a popular ski center. What he discovered can only be described as otherworldly. Trees and lookout towers fully encased in hard layers of rime ice, formed by high winds and freezing fog. Korosec says some of the ice spikes growing off the tower reached well over 3-feet (100cm) long. To see more of his weather photography and additional images from this shoot, head over to his 500px page. All photos courtesy the photographer.

Artist Li Hongbo, whose flexible paper sculptures we’ve admired many times here on Colossal, recently created a new series of silhouette artworks as part of a solo show at Contemporary by Angela Li in Hong Kong. Each piece is delicately cut from the knife leaving a complementary negative space from which it appears to rise. Hongbo says the pieces are meant as a warning, that “human beings will eventually destroy themselves because of their gluttony and their abuse of animals.” You can see more from the series here. If you liked this technique, also check out paper sculptures by Peter Callesen. (via My Amp Goes to 11)

Philippines-based illustrator Kerby Rosanes began his career as an artist by doodling away in Moleskein notebooks and sharing the results online. Rosane’s imagination runs wild in his composite images of cartoony characters that morph into familiar faces of animals and pop-culture characters. After a number of art and design blogs picked up the story last year, his career took off, and the self-taught 23-year-old found himself creating illustrations for Nike, Mazda, and Ford. Seen here are a number of recent sketchbook spreads, but you can see more by scrolling through his archives. (via My Modern Met)

This 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle contains exactly 1,000 different colors arranged in the form of a CMYK gamut and is guaranteed to drive you insane. The creator of the 1,000 Colors puzzle, Clemens Habicht, suggests the puzzle is actually easier than traditional image-based puzzles. When faced with a field of color, he says the placement of every piece becomes almost intuitive.

The idea came from enjoying the subtle differences in the blue of a sky in a particularly brutal jigsaw puzzle, I found that without the presence of image detail to help locate a piece I was relying only on an intuitive sense of colour, and this was much more satisfying to do than the areas with image details.

What is strange is that unlike ordinary puzzles where you are in effect redrawing a specific picture from a reference you have a sense of where every piece belongs compared to every other piece. There is a real logic in the doing that is weirdly soothing, therapeutic, it must be the German coming out in me. As each piece clicks perfectly into place, just so, it’s a little win, like a little pat on the back.

The 1,000 Colors puzzle ships from Australia and costs about $33 (about $58 with shipping to the U.S.). (via Boing Boing)

Working from his studio in Alpine, Texas, artist Mark Lovejoy creates richly textured images of mixed paint, but although he’s somewhat secretive about his process, one thing is clear: they aren’t just photographs of mixed paint. The act of creating the color formations alone sounds more like an act of chemistry than art as he mixes resins, oils, diluents, waxes, and drying agents to create the gloppy textures you see here. Portions are then photographed, reworked, and reshot. In the end, we’re left staring at beautifully colorful images that exist somewhere between salt water taffy, Jackson Pollock paintings, and an alluring industrial accident. Whatever they are, Lovejoy is extremely proficient, cranking out several images each day which he shares on his website. Prints are available of every image. (via It’s Nice That)

When we last covered the pen and ink drawings of Ben Sack, the artist was in residency aboard the m/s Amsterdam, a ship that circumnavigated the globe from January through April 2014. Sack’s latest drawings are partially influenced by stops in dozens of port cities during the expedition. As well as geography, his drawings are heavily influenced by architecture, history, and classical music. Via Robert Fontaine:

Sack’s work explores architecture as a flexible medium capable of expressing the unique space between realism and abstraction; where interpretation and our ability to create meaning is in flux. Within this space, Sack, furnished with pen and ink, encapsulates both the infinite and infinitesimal. His work invites the eye to explore drawings of the “big picture,” to gaze into a kaleidoscope of histories and to look further into the elemental world of lines and dots.

Lisbon-based street artist Bordallo II (previously) recently completed work on two new bird installations, an owl and heron, created from painted trash and other objects affixed to a wall. You can see additional new works by following on Facebook.

>> The title of the post is how the imaginary postcard would have gone if I had gotten my wish to stay on… and on… and on… It will surprise nobody that I’ve returned from my too short first-time trip to Marrakech in Morocco longing to go back. The natural oohs and aaahs that the intensely vibrant yesteryear city incites are fully warranted. I’ve just had to wait a while to experience it. Despite my tardiness to the joys of Marrakech, I’ll still be rounding up my three day stay, with much thanks to Black Tomato Travel, with a hefty post once I’ve sorted through the bajillion of pics we took.

Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech in 1969

For now, I’m keeping it short and sweet. Let’s kick it off with “Love”, the theme of Yves Saint Laurent’s greeting cards, which he would create out of collage every year to send to close friends and clients to ring in a new year. Their designs are on displayed at the Galerie Love Saint Laurent within the beautiful Jardin Majorelle, which Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé rescued in 1980 and used as his Marrakech bolthole. It felt like a pilgrimage of sorts, visiting the beautifully landscaped gardens on Rue Yves Saint Laurent, a tranquil world away from the dusty bustle of the Medina, where Saint Laurent’s ashes were scattered when he died in 2008. Except instead of feeling sombre like you would at a grave, it was celebratory of Saint Laurent’s love of this garden, carefully restored, cultivated and maintained by Berge and Saint Laurent, and of his overall love of this mysterious city, where he felt the creative freedom to dive into an extremely colourful oeuvre in the 1970s, furiously sketched out in felt tips, and fuelled by his tight knit circle of muses wafting around.

The exuberant and often witty graphics that Saint Laurent designed as greetings cards, exploding with colour and fun, moments of frivolity captured in his turbulent emotional life. The beautiful merchandise in the Boutique Majorelle (no normal souvenir shop) – took inspiration from the cards and so it is I came home with a pair of embroidered leather slippers, spelling out LOVE, the only emotion I was ever going to feel for this city.